2. The second age of man
Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
As You Like It
Elizabethan Education
3. What is your legacy from the vestarian
controversy?
Archbishop of Canterbury, 1588=1604
Latin biretta with pompom
4. Responsibility of Children
• Respect even if the parents were of lower
social class
• Admonish parents who stray from biblical
concepts
• Support for parents in need
5. Literacy – Ability to sign one’s name
Men Women
1500 10% 1%
1558 20% 5%
1600 27% 8%
Additional Evidence – Surviving Letters from Women
30% from aristocracy
60% from gentry
10% from middling (wives or widows of lawyers,
clergymen, merchants and wealthier tradesmen)
7. Needs of Society for Education
• End of clerical monopoly on access to
administrative positions
• Increased need for vocational literacy
• Church control lay control
• Decline of idea that education should be class
restricted
– Register at Rivington, Lancashire shows level from
knight to husbandman
8. Philanthropy
• 31% for schools during Elizabethan period
– Continued and expanded, particularly for
grammar schools in early Stuart period
• 7% for religion
• 4% for hospitals (1480-1660)
9. Philanthropy – Bristol (1480-1660)
• Poor relief 48%
– Doles, almshouses, plans to prevent or relieve
poverty
• Education 21%
• Religion 13%
• Municipal improvement 12%
Jordan, Wilbur Kitchener. "The forming of the charitable institutions of
the West of England: a study of the changing pattern of social
aspirations in Bristol and Somerset, 1480-1660." Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society (1960): 1-99.
10. Changing distribution of charity
Bittle, William G., and R. Lane. "Inflation and Philanthropy in England: A Re‐Assessment of WK
Jordan's Data." The Economic History Review 29.2 (1976): 203-210.
11. Humanist Basis
• Colet – St. Paul School – Latin by imitation
– Latin training to produce gentlemen
• Magdalen School – Latin by grammar
• Vives
– Latin training to turn the beast into the man
• Education as a cure for social problems
– Thomas Cromwell – priests to arrange basic
religious and vocational education for all children
12. Public Education
“all may learne to write and read [English]
without daunger”
But all may not to learn Latin because so many
“gaping for preferment, as no goulfe hath stoore
enough to suffise” is dangerous to the state
Richard Mulcaster,
headmaster, Merchant Taylors’ School,
1581
13. Changes
Medieval
• Church control
• Church finance (often
from benefactors)
• Fees
Early modern
• Secular control
• Finance by benefactors
• Generally free
14. Petty School
• Start at 4 or 5 years old
• ABC’s; spelling,
punctuation
• Lord’s prayer
• Virtues
• Numeration (as letters or
figures): addition
• Casting of accounts
18. Admission to Grammar School
• Seven years old
• Know how to read the New Testament in
English
• Know accidences (inflections)
• Every town should have a school where a man
or woman teach children these elements
– Advocated by Brinsley in Ludus literarius: or, the
grammar schoole 1612
19. Paying for school
• Shrewsbury had a sliding scale
ten shillings for a lord’s son; four pence for the youngest
son of a local burgess.
• Almondbury
All such poor children born in the parish of Almondbury
whose parents receive weekly or other constant alms of
the parish or other charity or by reason of their poverty
pay no taxes to the Church or King, shall be taught in the
school the Latin and Greek tongues gratis, but such poor
children shall be obliged to get moss for the roof of the
school and clean the desks and school without neglect
to their learning.
20. Who went to school
From Norwich Census of the Poor – 1570
• Oldest identified at 15
• Oldest son in family
• Where indicated, daughters of ~6
• About 1/3 of poor families with school age
children had a child in school
25. Curriculum
Train a child in the way
he should go.
Proverbs 22.6 (Hebrew)
Suffer the little children
to come unto me.
Matthew 19.14 (Greek)
Remember thy Creator in
the days of thy youth.
Ecclesiastes 12.1 (Latin)
26. Custodes or asini
• Designation for
– Talking in English
– Three mistakes in rules of grammar
– Three misspellings in written work
27. Question for Demosthenes
What was the Chiefe Part of an Oratour?
Demosthenes: Action
What next?
Action
What next again
Action
Francis Bacon “Of Boldness”
28. Student declaiming
from memory, 1573
“The schoolhouse should be
in deed . . . The house of
play and pleasure, and not
the house of fear and
bondage.”
Ascham quoting Wotton in
The scholemaster or plaine
and perfite way of teachyng
children, to vnderstand,
write, and speake, the Latin
tong, 1570
31. A dialog on education (reported by Ascham)
Cecil: [I] Wishe, that some more discretion were in
many Scholemasters, in using correction, than
commonIie there is. Who many times punishe
rather the weakeness of nature, than the fault of
the SchoIer. Whereby, many Scholers, that might
eIse prove well, be driven to hate Iearning, before
they knowe what Iearning meaneth: and so, are
made willing to forsake their booke, and be glad to
be put to any other kinde of Iiving.
William Peter: . . . the Rodde onelie was the
sworde that must keepe the SchooIe in obedience,
and the SchoIer in good order.
33. Merchant Taylor’s School
List of students in first
form, 1607
• Ages
• Admission dates
• Requirements for
probations (thrice-yearly
examinations)
• Only 2/40 make it to the
6th form
35. Exercises
• 2nd form: recite the rules for the different noun
declensions and six of Aesop’s fables
• 4th form: all the rules of Latin grammar, some of
Cicero’s disquisition on fortitude from De Officiis,
and the first seventy-six verses of Ovid’s De
Tristibus.
– Greek terminations for all the noun declensions and
verb conjugations.
– Afternoon: translate an English letter into Latin as a
letter, a dialogue, and a poem
36. School Plays
Norwich – King Edward VI Grammar School
• Yearly performance of ‘ “learned dialogue” or
comedy by the boys for and audience.
38. Attitudes towards football
1576 Indict sixteen persons – husbandmen,
yeomen, artificers, and the like – for that they did,
"with unknown malefactors to the number of a
hundred, assemble themselves and unlawfully play
a certain unlawful game, called football, by reason
of which unlawful game there arose among them a
great affray likely to result in homicides and fatal
accidents.”
James I "From this Court I debarre all rough and
violent exercises, as the football, meeter for
lameing than making able the users thereof."
39. Education by Gender – The Willoughbys
Francis
• ABCs
• Latin grammar books
• Grammar school education
• Latin: Cato, Cicero, Vives'
dialogues, Terence, Erasmus
and Valla
• Some Greek
• Ciceronian rhetoric
• Humanist script
• Arithmetic
Margaret
• English: Bible, The Book of
Common Prayer
• Using counters for
arithmetic
40. The Value of Reading
Judicial record of the fate of two participants in
a burglary in I6I3
• "The said Paul reads, to be branded;”
• “the said William does not read, to be
hanged".
41. Writing
• Grammar schools emphasized reading and
speaking
• Ascham [Scholemaster, 1570] required
– Paper book for written translations from Latin
– Paper book for translations of English back into
Latin
– Paper book for recording usage by Lating authors
• Writing schools as stand-alone or adjuncts
42. Commercial Education
• Christ’s Hospital Writing School
– Connected with Christ’s Hospital Grammar School
– Founded 1577 by Dame Ramsay
– Teach poor children to write and cast accounts
• Later independents listed as “writing masters
and accountants”
43. Learning to write, “secretary script”
Jehan de Beau-Chesne, 1602 (original published 1570)
46. Writing – To the instructor
[For the]… Scholler to learne, it may do you
pleasure,
To rule him two lines iust of a measure:
Those two lines betweene to write very iust,
Not aboue or below write that he must:
The same to be done is best with blacke lead,
Which written betweene, is cleansed with bread.
Your pen from your booke, but seldome remoue,
To follow strange hand with drie pen first proue
47. School rules
2015 What happens if a student brings pen knife
to school?
• At best, he/she gets sent home.
1580 What happens if a student doesn’t bring a
pen knife to school?
• He gets sent home
48. Pangram, 1650
“Job a Righteous man of uz
waxed poor Quickly”
Written by Stephen Poynting
49. Middle Class Women’s Education
• Religion
• Housewifery
– needlework, dressing meat and keeping accounts
• Music
• Reading
50. The School Day
Start 6 a.m.
Instruction, repetition, memorization
Break for breakfast
Instruction, repetition, memorization
Break for lunch Instruction, repetition, memorization
Break for supper
Instruction, repetition, memorization
Finish 7 p.m.
Estimate six hours of exercise/hour of instruction
51. Grammar school routine
• Given a selection from an ancient author to
study
• Next day between 9 and 11
– Master calls on those selected “by fear or
confidence in their looks
– Repeat the passage clearly without the book
– Commended of beaten
52. Commonplace book,
An edited collection of
striking passages
noted in a single place
for future reference.
Early 17th century
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University
53. Who went on to higher education
1575-1639
• 50% gentlemen and above
• 41% below gentleman
• 9% clergy of all levels
• Based on self-assessment at matriculation
Editor's Notes
1552 school seal from Louth Grammar School
"He that spareth his rod hateth his son Proverbs 13:24
The controversy swirled around the legal requirement for
Church of England ministers to wear a square cap and a surplice, a white linen gown with drooping
sleeves. Both of these garments were part of the traditional uniform of the Catholic clergy and few
English Protestants had any enthusiasm for the "popish rags." Since the beginning of Elizabeth's
reign, many Protestant ministers had refused to wear these garments and while this was illegal,
certain bishops had tacitly permitted and even licensed the practice. This displeased Elizabeth from
the start and on 25 January 1565 she chided Parker and the bishops for their laxity and demanded
the enforcement of the laws governing clerical vestments
When an elderly Chester tanner petitioned for financial assistance in 1598, the quarter sessions ordered his son and heir, also a tanner, to provide him with a gown and 205. per quarter.
As universal estimates of literacy, it is thought that figures based on signatures overestimate the percentage of people who could write in a functional sense, beyond merely signing, and underestimate the percentage of people who could read.
women’s letters exhibit many of the features associated with the spoken as opposed to the written word Indeed, during this period the
letters of women from the lowest social groups represented by this study—the daughters
and wives of merchants—are most likely to exhibit oral traits. Among these individuals
are the women of the Herrick family of Leicestershire, and Sabine Johnson, the wife of the
Staple merchant, John Johnson. In both cases, the spellings of female letter-writers are more idiosyncratic than those of male family members. Representative of Sabine Johnson’s spelling is the postscript of a letter to her husband dated 1545; in it she wrote that her ‘hataly desyer’ [hearty desire] was that he ‘com soong whom aghan’ [come soon
home again].
This is in spite of a loss to female education with the closing of convent schools by Henry VIII>
Result: there were more endowed free schools in England in I650
than there were in 1850
Poverty became more urban and more public. Men tended to starve quietly and inconspicuously in
bad years and in marginal communities in the Middle Ages, but not most
certainly in the sixteenth century. Poverty was now too public a phenomenon,
there was the driving conscience of a Hugh Latimer, and there
were his successors. And there were the sturdy beggars bred of dislocation
and rootlessness
McIntosh, Marjorie K. "Poverty, charity, and coercion in Elizabethan England." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.3 (2005): 457-479.
Jordan, Wilbur K. "The English background of modern philanthropy." The American Historical Review (1961): 401-408.
The works most extensively consulted are Erasmus’ A Declamation on the
Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children (1529), which went into some fourteen
editions (De pueris 292-94), and Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman (c1523),
originally written for Princess Mary, which went into over twenty editions published
before the end of the sixteenth century (De institutione xiii). Both these important treatises
were available in translation in English.
Three major pedagogical works by English authors have been consulted. The
Book named the Governour (1531) by Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?-1546), deals with the
education of the English governing class, and was reprinted at least seven times by
1580.16 The Scholemaster (1570), by Roger Ascham (1515-1568), Latin secretary to 7
Queen Mary and tutor to Queen Elizabeth, is a treatise on the private education of
gentlemen, which went into six further editions by 1589.
The content of the Tudor school curriculum, the humanistic “New Learning,” was
inherently hostile to women. It privileged (supposedly) masculine values over
(supposedly) feminine values; it prized oratory and performance skills, skills not publicly
acceptable in women, and it taught boys to communicate in Latin and Greek, languages
not commonly used by women. Schoolboys were encouraged through the medium of
Latin school exercises and literary texts to disassociate themselves from feminine values,
and to become part of a superior, masculine culture.
Cromwell's scheme was never developed. It came to nothing because
his energies were not devoted to promoting popular education, no funds
were applied to it, and the country did not want it.
Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant Taylors’
School, one of England’s largest schools, and an ardent supporter of public education,
devoted two chapters of his 1581 treatise on education to the problem of over-enrolments.
He reiterates a number of times that while “all may learne to write and read [in the
vernacular] without daunger,” all may not advance to learn Latin, for to have so many
“gaping for preferment, as no goulfe hath stoore enough to suffise” is dangerous to the
state (Positions 137.25; 139.27-28).
Goes on about lewd plays which should be avoided.
The petty school was often run by a
young housewife who taught the local children in her home for a small fee. It
was a common practice for pupils to enter petty schools at the age of four or
five. The alphabet was mastered on a hombook and reading on the ABC with
the CaIecln'.s'ni and then on the Primer. These were the only English books
pupils used in petty schools. A hombook was a wooden tablet covered with
a sheet of paper containing the alphabet and Paternoster in English. It was
covered with transparent horn. hence its name. and equipped with a handle for
better handling. The ABC book was a pamphlet with texts of the Patemosler.
Ave Maria. Creed. and Ten Commandments. Primers were books of devotion
containing some loath liturgical offices. Psalms. and litanies’. ln petty school
children also learned lessons in behaviour.
Now work with nobles 6s 8d and marks 13s 4d
To the Horn-book we have an interesting reference in Love's Labour's Lost, v. i.
Moth. He teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward, with the
horn on his head ?
Holof. Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.
Moth. Ba ! most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
Often ABC with catechism. Found at different levels.
Laurence Milford was licensed to teach young children in 1579. (fn. 1)In 1593 a school was endowed with over £100 by public subscription. (fn. 2)Although the 103 subscribers included several gentlemen and the rector, William Smith, the bulk of the money was given by villagers in sums of £2 or less. The funds were to be managed by the churchwardens and four other inhabitants, and the master was to be appointed by the rector and six leading villagers. The school was intended for the children of the subscribers but the poor were to be taught free. The first master may have been Milford, who signed the articles of agreement regulating the school. (fn. 3)Control was vested in Smith and his successors as rector. (fn. 4)In the 17th century the school contributed to a high level of literacy among the farmers (fn. 5)and perhaps taught several university entrants
Teacher pay about 20 pounds/year.
Margeri, the wyf of Wm, Pallin, gon from hyr 6 yer, of whom she have no helpe, of 53 yeris, that spyn white warpe; & 2 children of 12, 8 yers, that weave lace & go to skole, & have dwelt here 34 yer Myserable pore
Thomas Plom[er]ton of 49 yeres, laborer not in worke, & Alyce, his wyfe, of 43 yer, that washe & spyn; & 5 children of 14, 10, 11, 6, 4 yeris, & go al to skole, & hath dwelte her 13 yere & cam from Calyn
Established by the Guild of the Holy Cross, the School can trace its origins to May 1295, when in the Register of Deacons of the Diocese of Worcester there is the record of the ordination of Richard as rector scholarum, to teach the basics of learning the alphabet, psalters, and religious rites to boys.
The School was independently endowed by Thomas Jolyffe, a chaplain of the Guild, in June 1482. He gave to the Guild all the lands in Dodswell and Stratford; the income from them was to be used, under certain conditions, on behalf of the School.
Although the Guild of the Holy Cross survived the reign of Henry VIII, it was suppressed by his son, Edward VI. When Royal commissioners visited Stratford in 1545 – 1546, they made note of the School above the Guildhall. When Edward VI granted the old Guild properties to the corporate hands of the townspeople, he also granted a Royal Charter in 1553, making the Guildhall their headquarters, and assuring the future of the School.
200 year old desks not Tudor
In what is still known as ‘Big School’, from the age of seven Shakespeare would have been taught Latin, Rhetoric and perhaps Greek. Lessons began with prayers at six o’clock in the morning during summer, and continued until 5 o’clock in the afternoon. In winter, although boys were expected to bring their own candles, the poor light meant a shorter day lasting from seven o’clock.
Free school founded along with Oakham school, Rutland
The curriculum drew heavily on the comedies of Terence and
Plautus, on daily exercises in versifying, and on dialogues and declamations. Inevitably,
acting skills formed part of the rhetorical techniques, schoolboys being trained to
“pronounce without booke, with that kinde of action which the verie propertie of the
subject requireth, orations and other declamatory argumentes” (Positions 67.9-12). In
Damon and Pithias (1564-68), a play written for performance by the Children of the
Chapel, the prologue reminds the audience of the dramatic decorum of “speeches well
pronounste, with action lively framed,” and boasts that the author, Master Richard
Edwards, is following Horace whose writings he has taught in school.1
Note switch in readiness. Ascham and Cecil in conversation talk about an incident in which Eton students ran away out of fear of punishment. They advocate more discretion on the part of teachers lest students are driven to hate learning before they understand its importance.
I have strange newes brought me, sayth M Secretarie (Cecil), this morning, that diverse SchoIers of Eaton, be runne awaie from the Schoole, for feare of beating.
Merry Wives
Mrs. Page. I’ll be with her by and by: I’ll but bring my young man here to school. Look, where his master comes; ’tis a playing-day, I see. 5
Enter SIR HUGH EVANS.
How now, Sir Hugh! no school to-day?
Eva. No; Master Slender is get the boys leave to play.
Quick. Blessing of his heart!
Mrs. Page. Sir Hugh, my husband says my son profits nothing in the world at his book: I pray you, ask him some questions in his accidence. 10
Eva. Come hither, William; hold up your head; come.
Mrs. Page. Come on, sirrah; hold up your head; answer your master, be not afraid.
Eva. William, how many numbers is in nouns?
Will. Two.
Quick. Truly, I thought there had been one number more, because they say, ‘Od’s nouns.’ 15
Eva. Peace your tattlings! What is fair, William?
Will. Pulcher.
Quick. Polecats! there are fairer things than polecats, sure.
Eva. You are a very simplicity ’oman: I pray you peace. What is lapis, William?
Will. A stone. 20
Eva. And what is a stone, William?
Will. A pebble.
Eva. No, it is lapis: I pray you remember in your prain.
Will. Lapis.
Eva. That is a good William. What is he, William, that does lend articles? 25
Will. Articles are borrowed of the pronoun, and be thus declined, Singulariter, nominativo, hic, hœc, hoc.
Eva. Nominativo, hig, hag, hog; pray you, mark: genitivo, hujus. Well, what is your accusative case?
Will. Accusativo, hinc.
Eva. I pray you, have your remembrance, child; accusativo, hung, hang, hog.
Quick. Hang hog is Latin for bacon, I warrant you. 30
Eva. Leave your prabbles, ’oman. What is the focative case, William?
Will. O vocativo, O.
Eva. Remember, William; focative is caret.
Quick. And that’s a good root.
Eva. ’Oman, forbear. 35
Mrs. Page. Peace!
Eva. What is your genitive case plural, William?
Will. Genitive case?
Eva. Ay.
Will. Genitive, horum, harum, horum. 40
Quick. Vengeance of Jenny’s case! fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore.
Eva. For shame, ’oman!
Quick. You do ill to teach the child such words. He teaches him to hick and to hack, which they’ll do fast enough of themselves, and to call ‘horum?’ fie upon you!
Eva. ’Oman, art thou lunatics? hast thou no understandings for thy cases and the numbers and the genders? Thou art as foolish Christian creatures as I would desires.
Mrs. Page. Prithee, hold thy peace. 45
Eva. Show me now, William, some declensions of your pronouns.
Will. Forsooth, I have forgot.
Eva. It is qui, quœ, quod; if you forget your quis, your quœs, and your quods, you must be preeches. Go your ways and play; go.
Mrs. Page. He is a better scholar than I thought he was.
Eva. He is a good sprag memory. Farewell, Mistress Page
Loves Labors
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
[To HOLOFERNES] Monsieur, are you not lettered?
MOTH
Yes, yes; he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a,
b, spelt backward, with the horn on his head?
HOLOFERNES
Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.
MOTH
Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
HOLOFERNES
Quis, quis, thou consonant?
MOTH
The third of the five vowels, if you repeat them; or
the fifth, if I.
HOLOFERNES
I will repeat them,--a, e, i,--
MOTH
The sheep: the other two concludes it,--o, u.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Now, by the salt wave of the Mediterraneum, a sweet
touch, a quick venue of wit! snip, snap, quick and
home! it rejoiceth my intellect: true wit!
MOTH
Offered by a child to an old man; which is wit-old.
HOLOFERNES
What is the figure? what is the figure?
MOTH
Horns.
HOLOFERNES
Thou disputest like an infant: go, whip thy gig.
MOTH
Lend me your horn to make one, and I will whip about
your infamy circum circa,--a gig of a cuckold's horn.
COSTARD
An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst
have it to buy gingerbread: hold, there is the very
remuneration I had of thy master, thou halfpenny
purse of wit, thou pigeon-egg of discretion. O, an
the heavens were so pleased that thou wert but my
bastard, what a joyful father wouldst thou make me!
Go to; thou hast it ad dunghill, at the fingers'
ends, as they say.
HOLOFERNES
O, I smell false Latin; dunghill for unguem.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
Arts-man, preambulate, we will be singled from the
barbarous. Do you not educate youth at the
charge-house on the top of the mountain?
HOLOFERNES
Or mons, the hill.
DON
ADRIANO DE ARMADO
At your sweet pleasure, for the mountain.
HOLOFERNES
I do, sans question.
DON
probations were
instituted because “it hath fallen out of late daies, that some persons (having
had their children five or six yeres in our schoole) have complained that their
sonnes have not risen in learning, to be worthily placed in the highest formes,
as others have ben of lyke continuance.”2
While the minutes hasten to add that
the company believes that such slow progress comes about by “faults in such
parents as have not due regard in houlding their children to the schoole, or by
want of capacity in such schollers,” rather than by negligence in their teachers,
they note that the company’s concern for the reputation of the school and its
teachers has led them, forty-five years after the school’s founding in 1562, to
establish the thrice-yearly probation.3
Moreover, the instructions in the Register
itself pay particular attention to the integrity of individual performances, stipulating
that the exercises were to be timed and that “the Master of the schoole
. . . shall carefully and with watchfull eye provide that no scholler of any forme
doe prompt or leane towarde his fellow for help” (1r). The schoolmaster was
then to ensure that the examination papers, with each scholar’s name carefully
written upon them, were to be “sewed together into six severall volumes” and
laid “up in some convenient place appointed thereunto” so that future masters
and scholars, “by comparing their present exercises, with them of former tymes
may see how much and wherein they exceede or come behind them.”4
Perhaps
there are no individual “grades” recorded because the reduction of a complex
performance (in this case a mix of oral and written work performed over the
course of eight hours) to a number seemed onerous and unnecessary in view of
the preservation of the students’ written work
Once a semester tests by outside examiners.
At King Edward VI’s Grammar School in Norwich, for example, every year “the High Master was to choose a ‘learned dialogue’ or a comedy or two to be presented by the boys” to an audience which included the mayor (Norwich 46). The boy players are generally assumed to have ranged in age from ten and fifteen,6 and there is evidence that the stage props and costumes were, at least at some schools, quite extensive.
Expenditure records for the years 1550-1595 at Eton College identify: players’ garments, hats, beards, mechanical props, stage props, candles, torches, etc.:
Among the household papers of the Willoughbys of Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, is a fascinating account book of the 1550s which records the purchase of clothes, books and lessons for a young sister and brother, Margaret and Francis Willoughby, by their guardian.46 Each child received the education which was considered appropriate for later life.
Francis (later the builder of Wollaton Hall in the 1580s) was given an ABC in English, two accidences (grammarbooks) for the study of Latin, and grammars for both Hebrew and Greek. He went on to grammar school, first in London, later in Saffron Walden, and finally at Cambridge. Grammar school education took Francis Willoughby into a world of Latin literature that included Cato, Cicero, Vives' dialogues, Terence, Erasmus and Valla; he studied Greek, and later concentrated on English style, using such works as Nicholas Udall's Floures for Latin Speakyng (1533 and later editions) and Richard Sherry's Figures of Grammar and Rhetorick (1555 ). Francis learned to think along the lines established by his humanist teachers, structuring his arguments according to the rules of Ciceronian rhetoric. He even learned to write in the humanist script, the clearer and more modern Italian hand which was gradually replacing English secretary-even his handwriting distinguished him from his sister and those of lower social status. Lessons in arithmetic prepared him for the world of finance
Margaret Willoughby learned to read the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer (1552) and studied French. She entered the service first of the Duchess of Suffolk and then of Princess Elizabeth. Margaret Willoughby's formal education stopped there. 48; although Margaret learned to cast with counters, and thus acquired a skill to aid in household record-keeping, her education clearly lacked the theoretical and analytical component which her brother's schooling so clearly included.
Both children learned to play the virginals,
Firstly, of the 204 men sentenced to death for a first offence by the Middlesex Justices in I612-I4, no fewer than ninety-five successfully pleaded benefit of clergy. If 47% of the criminal classes of Jacobean London could read, this implies a literacy rate among the total male population of the City which was at least as great, and probably greater
Paper was first produced in England early 16th century and remained relatively expensive 4d/ folio
Writing came later. In 17th century accounts it often started with learning Latin.
Jehan de Beau-Chesne. A booke containing divers sortes of hands, as well as the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands. London, 1602, Folger Library
On both of these leaves, someone has tried to imitate the letter forms. In the top example, the brand new writer got through some of the minuscule and majuscule forms of the letter A (“a a a A A [upside down!] a a a”) before smudging out his or her work. Further progress is made on the “Italique hande” leaf, where the letters A through J (and perhaps an attempt at the letter K) are awkwardly and painstakingly formed underneath the exemplar.2
Children learned their letters by repeatedly tracing and copying strokes, letters, alphabets, pangrams (sentences that contain all the letters of the alphabet), and aphorisms. Beau-Chesne’s copybook was not the only one to contain the verse instructions, “Rules made by E.B. for children to write by,” that describe the ideal quill, ink, and posture for a child’s first experiences with writing. The instructions even advise on how the teacher should prepare the paper:
That is, use a graphite pencil to rule a piece of paper with sets of double lines for the child to write between. Then write some exemplar letters for the child to copy. He or she can trace them with an inkless quill in the first instance, and then proceed to use ink. The pencil lines can be erased with bread.
Note I and j are written the same as are u and v
The result might be something like below, in which one Stephen Poynting, possibly a student at the Free School in Gloucester, practices a pangram, “Job a Righteous man of uz waxed poor Quickly” (i/j and u/v counting as single graphs). He writes it twenty-one times, and his spacing between words grows larger and larger so that he can no longer fit the last word of the sentence (he appears to be writing one word of the sentence at a time, in columnar format). If you look closely at the piece of paper, you can see that it is blind-ruled; that is, guidelines have been made with an inkless quill to help him write in a straight line.
“Boys … had to keep notebooks or commonplace books in which to record, and then learn, idioms, quotations, or figures useful in composition or declamation. Not a little of that wide learning and impressive range of quotation adorning Elizabethan literature comes from these commonplace books.” Schools in Tudor England, by C R. Thompson (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1958)
Bias
Lower fees for lower classes
Higher class could graduate in 3 years and others in 4
Some did not matriculate because of fees
Contemporary complaint that the sons of the rich were squeezing into scholarships founded for the education of the poor certainly had some basis in fact. Fifteen out of the forty-seven classifiable scholars at Wadham between I615 and I639 were sons of gentry or above - six of them sons of esquires
Stone, Lawrence. "The educational revolution in England, 1560-1640." Past and Present (1964): 41-80.
